The Hillarization of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Not Going Well.

The attempts to Hillarize* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are wonderful to watch.  The right-wing apparatus tries everything they can think of, but the usual approaches don't work quite as well with her as they work with older women, largely, because she is too young to have a lot of life history which can be mined for any minor infraction.

So the (hidden) focus now seems to imply that she has stepped out of the proper role of attractive young women which is to be eye-candy while staring adoringly at older powerful male politicians.

That's the best way to understand** why the right-wingers think that a video of her dancing while in college would matter or that her old nickname (Sandy) would matter.  Those things are supposed to embarrass her now because they are the types of things eye-candy-hotties are expected to do.

This Boston Herald opinion piece is a good example of the way Ocasio-Cortez is currently being Hillarized.

But she has learned the lesson from the past and refuses to silently accept the Hillarization.  We shall see if it works, though I hope that it does.

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*  "Hillarization" is my cumbersome term for what the right-wing media did to Hillary Clinton over several decades by creating a loudspeaker which spewed nonstop information and misinformation about her perfidies and her sins, whether real or imaginary.

This approach creates the impression that something must be very wrong with a woman who receives such long-term treatment, even if actual data didn't support that conclusion.  Because all this worked so well with Hillary Clinton, it is now applied to other female Democratic politicians.

An important aspect of the Hillarization of female politicians is that the sins deemed important in the process are much milder and even insignificant if they applied to a male politician and that they are frequently about the kind of subtle violations of gender roles which would only matter when the object of criticism is a woman.

**  It's not the only way.  Some argue that the right-wing tries to label her as unauthentic, another device that the Hillarization process utilizes.  But I find the "eye-candy running wild when it's supposed to stay put and silent" theory the clearest explanation for what the right-wing tries to accomplish.